For Canadians unnerved about a Stephen Harper majority government, two facts about Monday’s election stand out.

The first is that virtually all of the Conservative gains occurred in and around Toronto. Of the 24 new seats Harper won across Canada, 18 came from the Greater Toronto Area — including nine from Toronto itself.

Or, to put it another way, Harper owes his majority to the voters of the GTA. His gains elsewhere were minimal. In fact, the Conservatives lost seats in both Quebec and British Columbia.

The second notable fact is that most of these GTA gains resulted from vote splitting between Liberals and New Democrats — vote splitting that, ironically, was fuelled by a last minute surge of support toward Jack Layton’s NDP.

In Toronto’s Don Valley West, for instance, the NDP won 1,182 more votes than it had in 2008 — just enough to deny victory to Liberal incumbent Rob Oliphant.

This NDP vote increase occurred even though the party’s candidate, Nicole Yovanoff, spent virtually no time in the riding, instead flying off to Kenora to manage another New Democrat’s campaign.

Conservative gains resulting from vote-splitting also occurred in suburban ridings outside Toronto like Bramalea-Gore-Malton that, until Monday, had been Liberal strongholds.

All of which is to say that pressure will be redoubled on both Liberals and New Democrats to unite the so-called left.

On Tuesday, the idea was cautiously refloated on CBC radio by Eddie Goldenberg, a long-time Liberal operative close to former prime minister Jean Chrétien.

Re-elected Toronto Liberal MP Bob Rae, a once and probably future candidate for his party’s leadership, was also careful not to dismiss merger talks when asked during his tour of early morning talk shows Tuesday.

Indeed, the Chrétien wing of the Liberals (which includes former New Democrat Rae) has long been interested in promoting an accommodation with the NDP. So have senior New Democrats like former Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow.

Critics including lame-duck Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff point out, logically, that a union of the left makes no sense: The Liberals are not a left-wing party.

But then neither is the NDP. In this campaign, Layton’s economic policy focused almost entirely on promoting small business. His platform said nothing about trade unions. The dreaded s-words — socialist and social democrat — were never mentioned.

Still, any talk of cooperation will not be easy. Liberal activists are used to fighting the NDP and vice versa. In parts of the West, the word “Liberal” is viewed as a curse word by NDP voters. In parts of southern Ontario, the reverse holds.

More important, the NDP is riding high on its election triumph. It’s the official opposition. It has seats in Quebec. Old dreams of squeezing out the Liberals and turning Canada into a two-party, left-right state have been revived.

This euphoria cannot last. NDP voters will soon realize that, even as leader of the official opposition, Layton has no influence over a Harper majority government. He will also be hard-pressed to navigate between a party that is traditionally centralist and a new Quebec voting base that is anything but.

As well, the Liberals are not a spent force. What happened Monday was not a repeat of the 1993 tsunami that left the old Progressive Conservatives with just two seats in the Commons. The Liberals still have MPs from every province except Alberta.

Eventually, both parties will be forced to face the mathematics of the situation. Each wants to be the one to defeat the Harper Conservatives. Neither can do it alone.

Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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